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Getting Executives Genuinely Active in Viva Engage, and Proving It Mattered

By Nicolas Saliba · 8 min read

Six weeks ago your COO agreed to post in Viva Engage every Friday. The first two were written by her, the next four were written by you, and last week’s went out at 17:40 because someone remembered. It has 4,100 views, nine reactions and no replies. In the monthly pack it will appear under “leadership visibility” with a green marker, and everyone in the room will privately know it is not working.

This is the standard failure, and it is caused by the standard fix. Somebody decided that the way to get leadership active was to commit them to a cadence. Cadence mandates produce volume, and volume is the one thing executive presence does not need. What it needs is allocation: a small number of appearances, chosen deliberately, in places where a leader’s presence changes what happens next.

Why the weekly mandate backfires

An executive who has committed to weekly posting will meet the commitment. What they will not do is generate a genuinely new thought every seven days while running a business unit, so within a month the posts become recycled town hall content, then delegated, then ghostwritten. Employees detect this with unnerving accuracy. A ghostwritten leadership post does not read as neutral, it reads as a corporate message wearing a first name, and it depresses the credibility of the next real one.

There is a second cost that is easier to miss. Every ghostwritten post trains the audience that replying is pointless, because the person whose name is on it will not be answering. Once a leadership feed has taught people not to reply, the reply behaviour does not come back when the CEO finally writes something themselves. You have spent the channel’s most valuable asset, which is the plausible expectation of a response, on filling a calendar slot.

Viva Engage gives leaders real affordances here, from a personal storyline to hosted question sessions and campaigns that group a conversation around a theme^[1]. None of them help if the underlying commitment is to frequency rather than to answering.

What executive presence is genuinely good for

Three jobs, and one it cannot do.

Making a decision legible. A leader can explain why a decision was taken in a way that no cascade deck can, because they can answer the follow-up. This is the highest-value use of an executive appearance and it is chronically underused.

Reaching past the management layer. A regional director hears filtered information. A public question thread lets a plant supervisor in Turin tell the operations director something their own chain would have smoothed over by the third handover. That is worth more than a hundred reactions.

Signalling what is safe to say. When a leader replies substantively to an awkward question in public, the whole organisation updates its model of what can be raised. Gallup’s long-running research on engagement consistently ties it to whether people believe their opinions count at work^[2], and a visible answer to a hard question does more for that belief than any campaign.

The job executive presence cannot do is guarantee reach. A CEO post reaches the people who already come to Viva Engage, which in most organisations skews heavily towards head office and knowledge workers. If your frontline is the audience you actually need, a leadership post is not the instrument, and our note on measuring frontline worker communications explains why the numbers flatter you here.

An allocation model instead of a cadence

Give each executive a quarterly budget of appearances rather than a weekly obligation. Five is a realistic number for a member of an executive committee. Then spend it deliberately.

Appearance type	What it is for	Who must actually write it	Realistic effort	What to measure
Decision explainer	Explaining why, not what, after a significant decision.	The executive, in their own words. Ghostwriting is detectable and self-defeating.	20 minutes to write, 40 minutes of replies over two days.	Replies from outside their own function.
Open question thread	Surfacing what leadership does not know.	The executive posts the question. The team can help shape it.	10 minutes to post, 60 minutes of answering.	Number of distinct sites or functions represented in the answers.
Answering someone else	Showing that replying is normal behaviour, not an event.	Only the executive.	5 minutes, several times a month.	Whether reply rates in that community rise afterwards.
Hosted session or town hall follow-up	Closing the loop on questions that could not be answered live.	Executive answers, team curates the questions.	30 minutes after the event.	Proportion of live questions that received a written answer.
Recognition of specific work	Making a particular contribution visible beyond its own team.	The executive, with a concrete detail only they would know.	10 minutes.	Whether the named team’s own participation rises.

Two rules make the difference between presence and broadcast. First, no post goes out unless the executive has blocked time to reply in the following 48 hours. If the diary cannot take the replies, move the post. Second, the awkward question gets answered. Not deflected into a private message, not passed to HR. Answered, in the thread, even if the answer is that a decision is not final. Nothing else you do will buy as much credibility, and nothing else will lose as much when it is skipped. Timing helps too, and our piece on identifying the best time to post on Viva Engage is worth reading before you schedule anything into a shift pattern.

How to tell whether it changed anything

Views and reactions on a leadership post are the wrong measures, because they answer a question about the post rather than about the organisation. Three measures are better.

Cross-boundary reply share. Of the replies to a leadership post, what proportion came from outside that leader’s own function or site? A CEO post answered entirely by the executive floor has demonstrated nothing.

Segment reach, against the segment the message was written for. A safety message from the operations director should be measured against operators, not against the tenant. Aggregate reach systematically hides the populations that matter most, which is why audience segmentation has to be in place before you set any leadership target.

Downstream question volume. The real test of a leadership appearance is whether people ask more in the following month, and whether the questions come from wider than before. This is a lagging measure and it is the honest one. Gallagher’s State of the Sector research keeps finding measurement to be the capability internal communicators name as their weakest^[3], and leadership reporting is where the gap shows up first, because it is the reporting most likely to be read by the person it is about.

The honest position on native analytics here

Viva Engage analytics will tell you how a specific leadership post performed inside its community, and for a single executive tracking a single post that is sufficient and free^[4]. It will not tell you who those responders were in organisational terms, because it does not join to Entra ID or an HR file. It will not compare a leadership campaign against the intranet and newsletter activity that ran alongside it. And its retention window makes a two-year story about whether an executive’s presence built anything difficult to tell.

Rebuilding this in Power BI against the Microsoft Graph reporting API is possible and some organisations do it well, but be clear about the commitment. The reporting API is not consistently reliable and produces days with missing data. Customers have observed KPI values in Power BI that do not reconcile with the native SharePoint reports for the same period. A dependable build needs a robust ingestion process, scheduled reconciliation against native figures and a named owner, so budget for the pipeline rather than the dashboard. Our honest guide to SharePoint analytics in Power BI covers the failure modes.

Tryane sits in that gap. It reads Viva Engage alongside SharePoint, Teams and your newsletter platform, joins the activity to your organisational structure through Entra ID or an HR file, and keeps history across product transitions, so a question about whether three years of executive presence changed the shape of participation is answerable rather than rhetorical. It is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant by design, hosts in the EU by default with US data residency on request, deploys in a couple of hours over Azure AD or Entra ID single sign-on, and installs no agent. If the wider problem is defending the function itself, see how to prove internal communications works to leadership.

Frequently asked questions

Our CEO will not post at all. What now?

Start with replying rather than posting. A CEO who answers three existing threads a month, in their own words, generates more credibility than one who publishes monthly and never returns. It is also a much smaller ask, which means it survives a busy quarter.

Is ghostwriting always wrong?

Drafting support for a complex announcement is normal and nobody objects to it. What breaks trust is a personal-sounding post the executive did not write and will not defend in the replies. The workable line is simple: the team can help with the post, the executive owns the thread.

How many executives should be visible?

Fewer than you think, and chosen for relevance rather than seniority. An operations director who answers plant questions properly is worth more to a manufacturing population than a chief executive posting quarterly. Deloitte’s work on the changing shape of the workplace is a useful reference when arguing this internally^[5].

What is a realistic reply rate on a leadership post?

It varies too much by sector and culture for a benchmark to be useful, and any number quoted without your own baseline is decoration. Measure your own first two quarters, then set a target against that. The composition of the replies matters more than the count.

Does Tryane replace Viva Engage analytics?

No. Viva Engage continues to record what it records. Tryane sits above it, joining Viva Engage, SharePoint, Teams and newsletter activity to your organisational structure so you can say which populations a leadership campaign actually reached. You keep the Microsoft 365 investment and add the layer native reporting does not provide.